


Children of the Barricade

by tilia_cordata



Category: Glee, Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Blood, Crossover, Death, French Revolution, Gen, OCD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 02:23:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/999743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tilia_cordata/pseuds/tilia_cordata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone is always left behind to clean-up when the fighting is done. Inspired by <a href="http://tilia-cordata.tumblr.com/post/53463157828/soundingonlyatnightasyousleep-tilia-cordata">this conversation</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Children of the Barricade

Emma lets one sob, one honest to goodness sob, escape from her chest. Her hands are still shaking, but she chokes back the rest. Her eyes are still full of tears, but she has work to do and she steps out the door into the street.

She almost begins to sob again, when she sees what’s left of the barricade, blood and broken wood and burnt fabric in the street. Panic rises in her and her breath catches, but she is here to work and she is here to help and she is here to return the world to normal, because nothing changes and another day has started.

Another woman hands her a heavy broom, and Emma begins pushing scraps and debris to the sides, carefully and methodically. She begins to sweep more frantically when she hits a layer of dirt that won’t budge from the cobblestone, until she realizes it is blood drying in the sun. Her heart races and her breath catches but she moves on to sweep another part of the street.

Shop owners and workmen have been clearing away the barricade. Everyone will have firewood tonight, she thinks ruefully. As a gap in the barricade clears and she can see through to the other side, she sees them, lined up in the street where they died.

She knows them all, these students and the pretty grisettes who followed them, thinking they were marching toward a new world. She set her broom down and walked over to the row. She knows what’s there, knows she shouldn’t look yet, knows someone will find her to tell her what she already knows. But she, left behind when the smoke is cleared, has to see for herself.

Brittany, Mercedes, Lauren, the first three (she knows the word she wants is bodies but all she can think is children) lined up in the street in front of the wine shop. Tina, waves of hair fallen out of the cap she tucked them in, reaching out. Emma bends down to fold her hands on her chest. Rachel, who seems even smaller in death than she was in life (perhaps because she can no longer sing). Artie, Finn, Sam, bits of red flag still gripped tight in their hands, together even in the end. Children.

The last body she recognizes, the one she was dreading from the moment he didn’t come home, is her husband. Will had sworn to her he would not go, that this was a young man’s fight and he was no longer young. But in the end he couldn’t leave them, or was it that he couldn’t let one last chance for glory pass him by? Either way, he was dead and cold and Emma was left behind to live in the world.

There was no new world, only this one, filled smoke and blood and dead children. And she could not bring them back, and she could not go with them. There was dust and dirt and bits of blood on her hands now, and she rubbed them against her apron. Her fingers itched and her heart raced, so she did what she could to quiet herself. She could clean, and she could go on, and the days and years would keep turning.  


End file.
